Placement Student — Digital Technologies

Why this role is important for CPI’s

 work

CPI is delighted to be recruiting for a placement opportunity who will join the established and growing Automation and Digital team within the National Formulation Centre based at NETPark, in Sedgefield.

Why join?

Our ideal candidate can be from any science/​engineering discipline with an interest in coding projects to deliver advanced data analysis, solve materials challenges and program state-of-the-art robotics. If you are eager to utilise or develop your existing digital expertise to deliver innovation and solve global challenges, please apply. You will gain hands-on experience in applying digital technologies to support our key markets, including process engineering, battery technology and nanotherapeutics. You’ll have the opportunity to contribute to groundbreaking projects and deploy digital/​ML tools to support internal and customer challenges.

About the role

This role gives you the opportunity to join an established team supporting and delivering in a variety of spaces. During this placement, you will support and strengthen the current capabilities of the team in support of exciting new capabilities that are being developed at CPI, such as federated learning, machine learning, soft sensors and database development.

About the team

The Automation and Digital team focus on deploying state-of-the-art techniques to enhance intelligent formulation generation, with a focus on optimising formulations for customers or developing novel tools to support production. Our expertise lies in leveraging advance data strategy with our automation tools, to ensure that every step from data generation to analysis add value to the project.

• Informatics and modelling: We use tools like Python, JMP and Alchemite to manage and analyse data, turning it to valuable insights. This include developing models to infer process parameters or to predict lipids for lipid nano particles.

• In our Automation and Digital Formulation lab, we have robots to automatically dispense, mix and test materials. Helping to improve formulation for a variety of applications including paints, coatings, lubricants, personal care products.

• Advanced Process Control: We leverage machine learning models and soft (software) inferential sensors to improve process monitoring. For example, developing viscosity soft sensor to infer viscosity from existing sensors, or predicting fouling in power plants, to determine optimum cleaning cycles.

We are looking for a placement student to support the digital projects of the Automation & Digital team. Your role will be digital-focused and be responsible for supporting the digital and informatics needs of CPI’s projects. This includes using digital skills and tools to design of experiments, model complex data to discover new relationships and optimise production, analyse, and interrogate data, and automate computational workflows.

You will work collaboratively on research projects, analysing and reporting data back to the project lead, and customers.

Some exciting projects we have recently worked on are:

Mattsense: Use of long short-term memory models to infer the viscosity of formulations from common sensors (pressure/​flow).

Narrator (Nanopharma): The application of state-of-the-art digital techniques to explore Lipid Nanoparticle manufacture to support RNA vaccines and therapeutics.

Constellation (Energy Sector): This project used AI and automation to optimise the performance of battery cells.

BatCAT: Project creating a digital twin for battery manufacturing integrating data-driven and physics-based methods for Li-ion and Na-ion coin cells and redox flow batteries.

Key responsibilities in the role include:

• To develop and implement digital solutions that address engineering and scientific challenges, including design of experiments, modelling complex datasets, and creating digital computational workflows.

• To analyse and interpret various sizes of datasets to extract insights, optimise processes, and support the development of predictive models and process control systems.

• To assist in managing and analysing data using tools such as Python, JMP, and Alchemite, ensuring data-driven decisions are accurate and reliable.

• To present and formally report experimental conclusions and supporting data for internal peer review and submission to clients, to agreed timescales and standards.

• To support the set-up, plan and execute experimental / pilot scale runs and analyse, interpret, and report the results of these within agreed timescales and quality standards, and following project/​client requirements.

• To take ownership in agreeing to weekly work plans with the line manager, project manager(s) and other relevant stakeholders, and delivering the plan to the agreed schedule.

• To maintain consistent and documented compliance with all relevant Safety, Health and Environmental (SHE), quality and best practice requirements.

• To keep self up to date with developments in areas relevant to role, and/​or legislative and SHE related changes as communicated by senior colleagues, ensuring understanding of these and any associated new best practice, methods, or techniques.

• To take responsibility for general housekeeping of technical areas, to contribute to a safe and healthy workplace.

The person we are seeking

You will be studying (or have recently completed) a minimum of HNC or Degree level (or equivalent) in a Scientific/​Engineering discipline. 

You will have demonstrable skills in technical problem-solving, with a particular emphasis on applying digital or programming solutions to complex engineering and scientific challenges. You will be able to apply your own judgement and initiative to the role, as well as an understanding of when to seek advice from colleagues. 

What does CPI offer you?

At CPI, we offer a wide range of benefits to our employees, this includes: